4. Revolutionary Ideas

Question 1

Summary

Answer 1

• Early 1700s - Of the 2.5 million White colonists, 45% of them were Patriots, 20% were Loyalists and 35% were undecided.
• John Locke emphasised three natural rights: Life, Liberty and Estate.
• Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776) brought the ideology of independence to its public and accessible conclusion. It sold 100,000 copies in the first month of publication and a million by the end of the war.
• 1772 - Committees of Correspondence (300 Branches with many in Boston)

Question 2

Magna Carta, 1215

Answer 2

• English document from the 13th century that was constructed to constrain the power of a monarch in favour of landowners and businesspeople.
• “No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned, disseised [dispossessed], outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will We proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land. “
• “To no one will We sell, to no one will We deny or delay, right or justice.”
• Source for their Constitution and the US Bill of Rights. Professor Peter Mancall: “the Magna Carta mattered because it demonstrated limits to the power of the monarch, which became one of the fundamental principles of British law”

Question 3

Glorious Revolution 1688/Bill of Rights 1689

Answer 3

• Glorious Revolution: the union of English parliamentarians and William III of Orange-Nassau that overthrew King James II of England, leading to his daughter Mary II and William III jointly taking the throne (also known as the Revolution of 1688)
• English Bill of Rights: an Act of the British Parliament passed in 1689, which declared the rights and liberties of citizens; it also settled the succession of Mary II and William III

Question 4

English Bill of Rights 1689

Answer 4

• Limited the power of the monarch. The monarch could no longer dismiss a judge or create new courts without parliamentary consent, nor maintain a standing army in peacetime or raise taxes.
• Both the Glorious Revolution and the English Bill of Rights (based on Locke’s ideas) in time would serve as ideological weapons for the American colonists as they used these precedents as political, legal, social, military and economic constraints against their very creators.

Question 5

Salutary Neglect

Answer 5

• Salutary Neglect: a term in American history that refers to the unofficial and long-term 17th- and 18th-century British policy of lenient or lax enforcement of parliamentary laws meant to keep American colonies obedient to England
• The period of 150 years from the early decades of the 1600s until 1763 in which the American colonies were virtually self-governed.
• Salutary neglect ended in 1763, with Britain attempting to extract more revenue (income) from its colonies – as opposed to just regulating normal trade – in order to pay for the massive French and Indian War debt in excess of £130 million

Question 6

Rights of Englishmen

Answer 6

• Rights of Englishmen: an assumed group of rights that had its roots in the basic rights granted in Magna Carta.
• Englishmen were entitled to a special heritage of rights and liberties was quickly gaining ground.
• In 1606, in the First Charter of Virginia, for example, King James I (reigned 1603–1625) guaranteed to the colonists and their posterity all of the “liberties, franchises, and immunities” possessed by anyone born in England. Every colonial charter included similar provisions.

Question 7

The Enlightenment

Answer 7

• A British and French philosophical movement in the 18th century whose ideas would inspire many of the American Founding Fathers
• Rousseau (1712–78), particularly in his book The Social Contract (1762), argued that society was divided into the government and the people, with each keeping the other in check.
• The government runs the country, maintains law and order, and protects the welfare of its citizens.
• The people pay for this stability and protection through taxes. When the government exceeds the boundaries set in place by the people, it is the mission of the people to abolish such government, and begin anew.

Question 8

John Locke’s Natural Rights

Answer 8

• John Locke: An influential 17th- and 18th-century English philosopher who contributed to the main ideas and ideology of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers of the new American state.
• Locke’s writings An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (1689) and Two Treatises on Government (1690)
• Locke argued that all human beings have three ‘natural rights’:Life, Liberty and Estate (or property) – that governments and royalty should not infringe upon:
• life – everyone is entitled to live once they are created.
• liberty – everyone is entitled to do anything they wish as long as it doesn’t conflict with the first right.
• estate – everyone is entitled to own all they create or gain through gift or trade so long as it doesn’t conflict with the first two rights

Question 9

John Locke’s Natural Rights 2

Answer 9

• In Locke’s first treatise, he disputed the concept of a monarch’s ‘divine right’ to rule.
• In his second treatise, he attacked the need for a ‘standing army’ and its potential use as a tool by a tyrant, and propounded the ‘social contract’ theory: that people have a right to revolt against a government that infringes on their ‘natural rights’.
• The British Parliament’s trespassing on these natural rights of American colonists provided ideological ammunition for the American Revolution, with the ideas of natural rights used in Revolutionary material before, during and after the Revolution